


for you, i'd start it again

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Series: full of field and stars, you carried all of time [1]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, alternate universe- max falls into the timestream, blood mention, i don't really have much to add, i just fell in love with all of these AUs, this one's a trip, whoof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 15:37:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13390896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: (100% a love letter to Recourse's work)Vic has a look for herself (most analogous to Damaged Goods)





	for you, i'd start it again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Recourse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Little Blue Pills](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6687919) by [Recourse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/pseuds/Recourse). 



> dear lord, please do read all of Recourse's stuff, it's heavenly

Max lays out all these Polaroids on your hardwood with her shaky hands, and they make your knees go like they’ve been cut through with pliers. Things that don’t make sense, there’s—   
Her and Chloe all ragged at the edges and smiling like jackals, puzzle pieces with blurry and folded ends from failing to fit in so many places. Tattoos crawl up Price’s arm and where they end at her throat, they start again on Max, dark, uncompromising lines over pale skin and freckles, painstaking, gouging dedication to a girl six feet in the ground. In the pictures, she lopes behind Max like a fucking wendigo or something, something lanky and dark-eyed and hungry from where the universe is a little loose at the seams, and Max— not your Max, one with a short-but-not-buzzed undercut done in Chloe’s cryptid hands— Max holds onto her like she  _ knows _ . And she does know, you posit to yourself, tears starting to sting a weird, wobbly neon in your eyes. This Max let the world crumple and tear behind her, locked her jaw around this girl that she loved, this girl that Arcadia wanted to swallow whole with a bullet to the abdomen, this girl that hurt and hurt and hurt everything to pieces. This girl holds Max like a fallen bird, blows smoke sweetly into Max’s open mouth, snarls at Max when she tries to hate herself, gathers all her rage and love to keep Max together because she can’t really ever understand why Max wants her around, why Max would give up everything else for her, but she’ll spend every second she gets because of it trying to make it up to her. Repaying a debt that Max tore to shreds and tossed to the storm at their heels.   
  
Max sob-hiccups when she gets to the end of those pictures, traces where tattoos should be up to the crook of her elbow and presses her head to the floor so bright blue fills her vision. You take deep, shaky breaths and move on.   
  
There’s a universe where Max lets go too late, loses both Chloe  _ and _ you to her mistakes, too many tries at rewinding, too clumsy and slow and afraid, and she tears her vocal cords from screaming when she wakes up. She doesn’t go to class for weeks and rots like fallen fruit in her room, dark and soft and heavy-sick-sweet until Kate gathers her up. Kate, of all people: pressing a kiss to the corner of Max’s mouth in their first photo, nervy and blushing and soft fingers on Max’s cheek— a Max that looks at this Kate with dilated eyes and her mouth loose.    
Max looks at Chloe like Chloe is the sun, awe-stricken and squinting a little because she’s so  _ much _ , bright and harsh and  _ close and searing and searing— _ Max looks at you like she can stomach whatever light you provide, no less enamored, you’d willed yourself to learn, just taking you all in at once, gazing up just so because you’re a little taller, enough that if you tilt your face up she can press her nose to the junction of throat and shoulder. Like you’re the moon and she knows, now, after these years, that she can reach out and her thin fingers will find you. But Kate— Max looks at Kate like she’s the last star in the sky.    
You choke, for this Max so hollow and polar, for Kate, for squeezing her eyes shut to her parents, to a God she can’t reconcile with Leviticus until she can kiss Max and not shake all her bones loose. They grow together so soft and sweet, like Chloe could never be, like you could never close your eyes long enough to fall into. Max’s pictures of Kate are warm and blurry at the edges: Kate with her eyes closed, violin cradled under her chin and the strings catching the light where they aren’t caked in rosin, Kate dancing with her dad at their wedding, tears streaming down her face, Kate with her nose touched to the rabbit on her chest. Kate who gives until Max is full of honey and  _ life _ because she’s seen Max torn empty and asunder and will not let it happen again.   
  
Max smiles at these with one corner of her mouth so the tears above run asymmetrical into it, thumbs at the worn corners of a few of the pictures and presses one white-knuckled fist to her chest like she’s keeping her heart in.    
-   
There’s digital, too.    
This little flash drive she digs into your palm until your fingers curl over it. “I can’t- I can’t watch it with you,” she rasps, knocks the balled-up toes of one foot against the floor.   
“It’s not for me.”   
(It doesn’t make sense that Max has this. You can’t even imagine what Max  _ is _ at this point—  you’re still shaking because she’s here and you’re decidedly not car-struck, and the snow in July outside is falling up. Slow, like disparate clumps of some impossible steam issuing from the grass, the cement, the asphalt.)   
  
You watch when she falls asleep.    
When she could get up you took her by the wrists into the shower and wrenched the knob so the water came down in full force. You pushed the wet hair from her face and backed up so you could just stare at each other, forceful in the way waves are, without anger, just  _ there _ and  _ heaving _ , steam hissing in and out of your open mouths until you both ran red in the face under the faucet and crawled out like foals.   
Your laptop’s light is sickly on your face, your arms and legs as you hunch over it, but it does what it’s meant to.

  
God, it’s a fucking mess. Snapchat stories, mostly, tangled up with some of your actual photography- half dark and low in the belly shots, women you’ve never met with their faces draped in their own hair, Vortex Club parties drained of color just so (paled, a little, but never in monochrome.  _ Never _ ), more bitter and twisted angles of the junkyard, like you’d been skulking it for weeks, not hours, and the other half something a little more like Max’s. A little more familiar. 

  
The stories scroll in one long confusing stream. You, one side of your nose crushed against your palm to stem thin drips of blood and pain like snorting wasps, but laughing your old eggshell-laugh, torso long and bare and smooth under pink and blue and white ( _ blood in the sink blood on your tongue blood dredging up dark and sick from your throat blood spread thin from vessels burst in your eyes) _ , pressing candy-whiskey kisses to the sides of Taylor’s face. The camera lingers just a little too long, though, because the tail ends of the videos catch a look you don’t remember on her: painful eyes, mouth parted but not to take in the sweet, hazy air, fingertips coming up slow to ghost at her cheek like you’d died there, like your lips were the end of a cigarette, lipstick for ashes, embers.   
-   
Rachel’s a fucking force of nature, in every one, and there are things you  _ do _ know, things that span the universes farther than Max knows, because they don’t unravel quite yet— Rachel with that look, appraising, lips pursed, open in the way a cat’s eyes are, dignifying in their gaze but betraying nothing for you to grasp onto. Like you, like you squirmed under when it was turned on you. Softer than you could ever be but for the down blizzards she sent up in your lungs— you never coughed up the feathers, not for anyone, you just swallowed them when they stuck in your throat and they scratched all the way back down. That was Rachel, smooth when she was on you and snaring, bleeding you when you tried to grab for her— you couldn’t do it, your eyes narrowed too much and your lip curled into your mother’s haughty frown. You only smiled, really smiled, when she was there, couldn’t make your mouth curve right of its own accord.    
-   
_ Rachel opens you like a fuckin’ Georgia O’Keefe flower, tongue sweet like she’s been sipping nectar from all those bottles and drawing up all these little, embarrassing sounds from your throat.  _ __  
_ Hands inching down your torso as she presses you up in a far, dark corner. You can feel her grin like the flat of a blade on your neck, feel that feather dip and rise out of the hollow of your throat when she laughs. She nudges your legs apart so you’re not really standing— floating with your heels scraping down the wall and your thighs draped over her hips just so— and everything goes in tandem: the music drops to something heavy and dark and the bass thuds in your spine, she crooks two fingers in you and presses like she’s holding down a violin string, and she bites the way you like too damn much so you squeal and choke up against her in the dark. You wish you were drunk, you wish she were brave enough not to be— one thing Rachel fucking  _ Amber _ can’t do, kiss you with no parachute.  _ __  
_ You wish she would let you touch her, get a little bit of that venom you love so much back in your fingertips, a little control, but no. Rachel gives in the way the ocean closes over your head and gives your lungs water, gives like giving is taking. And, after all this time, she knows how much you writhe when someone else has control. _ __  
-   
You weren’t enough for her. Nothing was.    
She burned through you and right on into Chloe, and you hated Chloe’s guts even more because you saw  _ you _ in her when Rachel kissed her and she sank sated and giddy on her.   
You could only ever be cold steel, and she was something molten, hollowing you out and making your insides glow red-white, and then she was gone. You— Max’s you, still, because she couldn’t go back far enough not to leave all those years ago, because your parents were your parents and William died and the world would always swing off Rachel like a door on one last hinge— formed around where she tore through you warped and harsh, looked at your dark, slitted eyes in the mirror and your mother’s mouth and you set your jaw to it. You weren’t warm, not ever, and people would freeze and burn if they tried to touch you.    
Max wasn’t here for this part and thank God she wasn’t, thank God she won’t watch these, because you spat like a cobra those years.    
Sometimes you snarled at Chloe and she laughed dark and hollow and pushed you up against the side of her truck so you scrabbled at her until you were too tired and exhaled wet and shaky into her neck. You’d wait til Kate was asleep to sneak out and crawl up into the passenger seat in the dark, trading smoke. Of everything, everyone, you two were the most violent— bloody from the same edge and stinging out in the cold and rutting, twisted, sorry and angry and high, usually. You got into coke and that made her roar even more, scared and angry because you were all she had and despite everything, she couldn’t lose you anymore. You liked being afraid, jittering from the taste soaking into your gums and from the rolling growls low in her throat like a big cat, you liked how her voice rattled your bones. You got angry when you were too tired to hurt each other anymore until it boiled down into something solid and low and  __ good , and you held and held and held and didn’t have to push anymore. 

  
You wheeze, because Chloe is dead and you could have  _ helped _ . You wonder which Max would go for, if this you, this scared, small you is enough without the heavy catharsis Chloe could’ve poured into your bones, if you’d let her.   
You wheeze because Kate waits for a decade to kiss you, because she turns out to be the toughest of all of you. Because she doesn’t need to scream until her voice splinters to bring you down, because she can make the two of you, a Chloe with her ear torn like a tomcat’s and a Victoria with ink deep in  _ your skin _ , see the God you don’t believe in when she touches you. Because you miss her, because you want her to baptize you in feathers, because you could drown in the love it takes to forgive someone like you.

  
You wheeze because there’s not a single time Rachel stays, lights down and loses her seraph-glow. She lives, sometimes, but she’s not really for you nor Chloe, smoke in your fingers, and she always goes, and she’s too far from Max to see where she ends up. Max calls it a flashpoint, when there’s no going back, but she didn’t decide this.    
Or maybe she did, maybe she went all Clara-in-the-timestream and wrote herself in and out of all of it, so everything knit together just right, maybe it would make your head spin to figure out where everything really starts. Where it ends, you don’t even bother— you’re holding the buzzing edges of all these other streams up to inspect, close and curious, and somewhere down it’s all tangling and strange.    
Somehow, Rachel is always herself. Because while the four of you— Kate, Chloe, Max, you and the not-you— shift together and apart based on who makes it if Max did this and not that, if she stepped with her left instead of her right, who crawled from the rubble with chalk in their hair, Rachel’s somewhere else. Like that movie with the flat geometric people, who couldn’t look up to the voice that was everywhere and nowhere because they didn’t know what up  _ was _ , she’s beyond you. And the more you see, the more that seems okay.   
But she always takes one of you up with her, her Yalith to the heavens, while the waters below close over the world like one long blink. Rarely you or Kate, your feet are deeper in the ground; she takes Chloe because she really does  _ love her _ , after it all; she takes Max because Max is sprouting wings of her own and the flight is easy.    
She takes Max, she breathes something ancient and primordial into Max like she’s shotgunning the universe, but she gives her back.    
-   
Coming down is like the gondola ride down from a mountain, ice in your hair and at the corners of your mouth, lungs straining a little less with every foot.    
Max is still asleep, and you wonder if you’re tripping, somehow, because she shimmers like the edge of a soap bubble when she breathes.  _ She came back _ , you think,  _ she cut a window back to you, she took a car out of your stomach and she fell into the universe for you _ . And so you kiss her, between her furrowed eyebrows, and you walk to the window with the moon filling up the little Venusian dimples in your back with silver and your feet sure on the cold floor, around the Polaroids.    
  
Max whines something quiet and ageless in the language of a time-traveler from the bedroom, and your hand is twitching with something white-hot and dizzy and there’s a song no one wrote for you on your tongue, familiar voice and familiar violin, and there’s a doe in the middle of the street with a blue feather growing, like one impossible antler, behind its ear.

**Author's Note:**

> title from for you by sales
> 
> misc. references:  
> -the movie flatland with all the geometric people, i watched it in sixth grade and dissociated through the skylight  
> -yalith (and the seraph aariel who carries her to heaven) from the book many waters  
> -cutting across worlds from His Dark Materials  
> -ye olde Doctor Who


End file.
